Black monument: Inscriptions within and against the monumental landscape
Seminar and Book Launch
This seminar explores the dissonant relationship between blackness and the western monumental tradition.
How do radical black thought, black communities, and black liberatory practices challenge colonial monumentality and its promotion of permanence, the nation-state, and liberal subjectivity? What artistic and curatorial strategies arise from this tension to rethink, reshape, and transgress the monument? Can black commemoration practices that refuse colonial frames of public memory reshape our visions of the monumental landscape of the future?
These questions will be unpacked through contributions by Olive Vassell (UK), Elizabeth Löwe Hunter (DK/US), Tawanda Appiah (Zim/SE), and Santiago Mostyn (TRI/US/SE).
The seminar will conclude with a celebratory launch of the anthology black monument (AHC and Archive Books) edited by G/HOSTING, accompanied by a live DJ set by Santiago Mostyn.
Registration
Participation is free, but registration is required. Register for the event here.
G/HOSTING
G/HOSTING is a Copenhagen-based platform, organized by Mai Takawira and Nina Cramer, that uses curatorial, editorial, educational, and dissemination projects to activate critical and reparative approaches to ongoing colonial histories. Through collaborations with artists, writers, and cultural institutions, G/HOSTING facilitates interventions into exhibitions, collections, public spaces, and academic discourses by foregrounding perspectives from the global majority. The anthology black monument (AHC, Archive Books, 2026) is G/HOSTING's first publication.
Moving Monuments
Moving Monuments is a research project at the University of Copenhagen, run by Mathias Danbolt and Amalie Skovmøller, that examines the aesthetic lives of monumental sculpture in the context of Danish colonial history. Working from the premise that sculptural monuments are dynamic historical agents whose functions and contexts change across time and space, the project examines the intersections of art, power, and imperial history. Read more about Moving Monuments here.
Black Monument
Black monument explores how artists and communities across Europe, North America, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa disrupt colonial monumentality. Featuring contributions from artists Justin F. Kennedy, Olivier Marboeuf, Jeannette Ehlers, patricia kaersenhout, and Abdul Dube alongside art historian Amelia Groom, black feminist scholars Lena Sawyer and Nana Osei-Kofi, and curator Tawanda Appiah, this anthology centers metamonumental practices—critical, sometimes speculative, and often ephemeral practices that refuse linear chronology and other Eurocentric frameworks. Against the backdrop of renewed power struggles over monumental landscapes and ongoing racial injustice, black monument asks: What forms of care for black histories emerge in the absence of sanctioned monuments?